To Trump supporters, you will not understand the pain the rest of the country suffers. To you it is thin-skinned weakness and a vast conspiracy against your interests veiled by inarticulate accusations of racism and xenophobia and all sorts of nasty terms that I am sure you don't believe is true about yourself because by some force I cannot fathom, you can convince yourself that you mean it when you say that "illegals aren't a race so I can't be racist"" or "Islam isn't a race so I can't be racist."

Maybe that's not you and I'm getting you pegged all wrong, maybe you agree that Trump is a very bad person socially but boy, you live in small town America and you are just struggling so hard economically and what was Hillary going to do, after all?

I get it (as much as a dirty city liberal can, I'm trying here), Trump voters, I do. You were angry about the accusations from mean screechy college students, and how Hillary was doing something with her emails that seemed fishy and it was on Wikileaks so it had to be bad. Whatever your reasons, you had them, and because of the electoral college, you won, and congratulations are in order.

However, the rest of the country will suffer. In fact, you, too, will suffer under Trump unless you are masochistic or that certain smart breed of sociopath. Liberals are over-empathetic, I know, but conservatives, especially know, respond as if empathy itself were weakness, a disease to be excised from the body politic, so maybe that's what you're going for. I ask only that you reflect on what you--and you personally--did in the years and months leading up to these events, as your hispanic neighbors are taken back to Mexico (healthy if they're lucky) and your Muslim neighbors are registered, perhaps even badged, or kept in their own neighborhoods--and how generous of us, after all, if we were to set up camps for refugees.

It may dawn on you one day that evil doesn't start by goosestepping right in and declaring itself, but it comes on bit by bit, piece by piece, until you wake up one day and there it is, goosestepping and hailing just as sure and as clear as if it had started that way, but it didn't, and now it's around.

Voted Clinton because I'm not dumb enough to think that a third party vote is anything but a waste. I do think Bernie could have weathered those and I wish he had the opportunity to because I think the entire narrative would have been different surrounding the election if the neoliberals were out early. They never were very good at being relatable. Hillary was going for all things to all people, and Bernie was going for demsoc Jesus. The fiery rhetoric and Spartan personal standards worked pretty well as a message of their own on people like me at the time, and it still would today.

The truth is, though, that there is nobody who is really to blame for Trump except for Trump voters. All the Stein voters and Johnson voters could vote for Stein and Johnson all day long from here until the end of time and it still would never amount to a Trump victory if none of the Trump voters had voted. Trump's victory and America's fucked up, imbalanced electoral-college suicide would not have been possible were it not for each and every voter who voted for Trump, and each and every single thing that Trump does over the course of the next four years that is even remotely in line with his campaign promises (even one of them would be enough to make him a bad president but an even worse human being) is the responsibility of his voters.

At this point there is no helping it, Hillary is the nominee. I in no way wish to ignore the many votes which she did receive during the primaries, and according to the DNC rules at least, it was a fair match-up. I believe the system of primaries and caucuses is unfair and skewed by its nature, and so I don't blame Hillary Clinton or even DWS for what happened because they, too, are part of a system larger than themselves which also supports this sort of thing for self-serving purposes.

Kindly put, I feel they did themselves a disservice here and that the result could have been different and more in line with an airtight anti-Trump ticket that would have trounced him handily. Now I am skeptical of their ability to pull off the kind of safe win they could have had, but I understand the reasons why they did what they did.

This, to me, is all the more reason why I feel there is only one real issue right now that ought to matter to the American people, that issue being campaign reform. Everything else hinges upon election reforms being imposed by the American people on the government so we have an actual democracy.

@66 I use 'rigged' as a term to illustrate that the deck is stacked against non-establishment candidates. Some people are okay with that because they believe that only establishment candidates who have chops within the party ought to be leading the party itself. Some others, myself included, feel that's backwards. I consider closed primaries and superdelegates to constitute a form of mathematical rigging wherein the interests of the party and insularity take precedence over the desires of the majority of Americans.

I understand their desire to prevent themselves from being sabotaged by people who don't like their party and want to see them fail but that comes at the unacceptable cost of shutting the door on independents who wish to make their voices heard, and about 50% of Americans are independents and not affiliated with either party officially, even if they de facto vote one way or another. Well, they get shut out of closed primaries by default, and even when they don't, the superdelegate system means it might not matter. Some of our superdelegates in Washington state were unwilling to follow their constituency and there's no rule dictating that they must. These numbers get unfairly tacked onto delegate numbers, making Hillary look like she's a stronger and more popular candidate in media reports when actually many of those delegates aren't representative of a large voting group but instead are individual superdelegates who are free to vote as they choose.

Does that constitute rigging? It's not stuffing the ballot boxes, but there was shady shit going on. That happens in every election by every party, I'm not so foolish as to believe the dems are above this sort of thing, but nevertheless it is bullshit. A presidential primary is supposed to *help* the party by indicating to it which of its potential candidates would have the best shot at winning the election. The poll numbers didn't really change throughout Sanders' campaign: He would have had a better shot at beating Trump than Hillary, so somehow we came up with the weaker candidate against the Republicans' looming crypto-fascist monster that even they are repulsed by.

PS Really love how this whole thing is framed as petulance. "Boo hoo, was baby's election rigged? Does baby want a fair democracy? Look, he's so red in the face because he actually wants meaningful campaign reform! Wah wah wah, cry me a river, just vote for the person you're supposed to already!"

@25 If I have "hurt widdle feewings" about voting for beets, when I was forced into voting for beets, when most people don't want beets, and when the beets turn out to actually--surprise!--be in bed with strychnine and its buddies, yeah, it's hard to vote for beets.

But okay, you win. On election day, I'll get up with a big ol' smile on my face and say "Gee aren't I just pleased as punch to be voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton, mmm-MM I just can't wait for her to sign the TPP and pivot to the right with her good buddy Mike Pence, an anti-gay anti-environment shitbag! Boy is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz? Let me get her autograph! Debbie, over here! I love your work shafting the middle class' voice! Will you sign my uncounted ballot from a state with closed primaries?"

Fuck you and fuck how eager you are to see me eat beets, especially after I agree to eat them. I'm not dithering about anything, I'm voting for Hillary and it feels vaguely like brushing my teeth with smegma and that's the goddamn truth. Call me a whiner all you want, it doesn't make her more palatable. I swear, *only* Hillary Clinton would be this unpopular compared to Donald Trump, America's sweatiest lobster-faced rapist sociopath for over 30 years. It takes a keen mind to be nearly as dislikable as that walking, talking turd but I ought to never underestimate the Dems' ability to take their votes for granted and spit in the faces of their own constituents.

Really glad Bernie was there to give Hillary the coronation she's been demanding all this time. Thanks for passing the crown and stepping down so the DNC is spared the hard work of meaningful socioeconomic change, buddy. We appreciate it!

If Bernie had joined the Greens, however... that would be a different story. It would still split the vote but in four years' time the Green Party would suddenly be a viable player and things would change. He would have made good on his promises to continue the revolution

But he didn't, so we're stuck with it being once again funneled back into the Democratic party like always. Trump is the true revolutionary, it's just that his revolution would suck even more than the status quo. Who knows? Maybe he'll get it and we'll get to watch things fall apart for four years. Maybe Hillary will get it and we'll have four years of tension and unpleasantries of more familiar stripe. It's anyone's game at this point, and by anyone's I mean not ours.

@134 I am under the same incentives as any other voter. I agree with a third party candidate more than I agree with either of the two mainstream candidates. However, I also know that Dan Savage is right even if he is being as petulant and insufferable as the people he's bitching about. The green party will not win this election. There's not even a little chance that they will. They haven't built up local support, they haven't proven themselves locally. However, there's not really a way to do that, either, unless people believe it's possible for you to win, and people don't believe it's possible for the Green party to win. If they did, then there would be a chance, but they don't, so there isn't. It sucks but that's the way it is.

If I voted green I would be throwing my vote in the trash. Now, I personally think that voting for Hillary Clinton has all the joy and appeal of getting a root canal while being neutered without anaesthetic by a young Helen Keller armed with a power saw, but I know that there's no way around it, it's just a bitter pill that yes, I have to swallow if I don't want Trump. Why? Because other people like me hate Hillary Clinton's guts viscerally and abidingly but unlike me they hate Trump just a teensy tiny bit less than they hate her, so he gets it, and then everyone is fucked.

If everyone does end up fucked by Trump, well, to be honest, we'll have deserved it, but if anyone asks, I'd rather just say I didn't vote for him and move on. America is in the process of being sodomized with a telephone pole, and so long as it's happening anyways, I'd rather we minimized the number of splinters we got, even if I sincerely believe that Hillary Clinton will sell our future. Maybe when she sells the futures of her supporters and reassures us that it's okay that we're all eating shit because she doesn't mind if we're queer or POC or women like her, we'll wise up. Until then, eat it up America.

You know what, buddy, some of us are trying really fucking hard to just plug our noses and eat the beets. The beets taste like garbage, just let them taste like garbage already and let us get this over with. They're not going to taste good just because they're not strychnine. You can't act surprised that we think they taste like garbage, because they do, but we're here eating the beets and not the strychnine. I'm trying not to be picky or petulant here, I'm really doing my best to try and eat what's on my plate. We'll accept that Hillary is the only viable person we can vote for with a chance if you can accept that she is on a personal level extremely difficult to like for many of us, does that sound like a fair deal?